Summary: In the previous eleven chapters of this series we examined
Arnold Hiller’s rise to power as British prime minister and his
crushing of all domestic foes; his 1936 occupation of Ireland; the
establishment of his alliance with Italy’s Benito Mussolini; his
invasion of France that touched off the Second World War and the
subsequent British takeover of French colonial territories in the
Middle East and North Africa; Ireland’s “Day of Broken Glass”; the
entry of the United States into the Second World War and the first
Anglo-American naval battles in the Atlantic; the fascist takeover
of Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War; Japanese preparations
for war in the Pacific against the United States and its CANZUS
allies; the British occupation of Iceland in 1939; and the beginning
of Operation Torch-41, the American campaign to liberate Bermuda. In
this installment we’ll explore the escalation of Hiller’s infamous
“final solution” crusade against the Irish people into full-fledged
genocide.

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There can be few words in the English language uglier than
“genocide”; the mere sound of it conjures up a sense of evil that
threatens to overwhelm the human mind. And although the term was
coined relatively recently in the history of civilization, the act
itself has unfortunately been a part of humanity’s legacy since the
days of Cain and Abel. It was during the BNSP’s rule over Britain,
however, that the machinery and methods of modern industrial culture
became an integral element of the process of mass murder. Hiller was
determined to crush the Irish people permanently, and if that meant
physically exterminating them as a society he had no compunctions
whatsoever about shedding their blood. If anything a part of Hiller
blatantly relished the idea of wiping them off the face of the earth;
more than once in his early years as British primer minister he had
told his confidants he’d like to see every man, woman, and child in
Ireland thrown into a furnace.

Henry Hamill and his SS were only too eager to carry out the
prime minister’s instructions in regard to the “final solution”.
Right from the start Hamill had regarded the SS as a bulwark of
British culture against the alleged barbaric hordes of Eire; when
Hiller gave his verbal consent for SS camp commanders in British-
occupied Ireland to begin mass killings of prisoners in the camps,
Hamill viewed as nothing less than the fulfillment of one of his
oldest dreams for the SS and for the BNSP at large. Once the prime
minister gave the green light for the extermination campaign to be
initiated the SS commander-in-chief threw himself into it with an
almost demonic relish; in an unpublished memoir found by advancing
American and Canadian troops in the ruins of SS headquarters shortly
after Hamill’s suicide in 1945, he waxed enthusiastic about what he
called “the great and necessary task now laid out before us”. The idea
that there was anything wrong with committing wholesale slaughter on
fellow human beings simply because of their ethnic background doesn’t
seem to have crossed his mind-- or if it did, he dismissed it with the
same brutal quickness as he dismissed the humanity of all the other
perceived adversaries of the BNSP regime.

Arnold Hyman was one of the first men Hamill recruited to run the
death camps. A close associate of Hamill’s from the earliest days of
the SS, Hyman had long been an integral participant in the SS’ anti-
Irish campaign; his only major qualm where Hiller’s “Final Solution”
was concerned was that the crematoriums which would be used to burn
the bodies of those executed in the camps might not be large enough to
accommodate all the corpses that would need to be burned following the
completion of the execution process. When Hyman brought this problem
to Hamill’s attention, the SS commander-in-chief solved it by turning
to a group of engineers who were on the payroll of the industrial firm
I.C. Barton and had extensive backgrounds in dealing with exactly the
type of structural challenges the design of the crematoriums posed.

Once that hurdle was cleared, the business of preparing the death
camps for their sinister task could proceed apace. The prototype for
these SS-run murder factories was established in a rural Cork village
called Ashworth; the first batch of Irish detainees marked for death
were to be executed within its gas chambers and then burned to ashes
in its crematorium. If this trial run worked out, Hamill told Hiller,
it would be a huge step forward in the BNSP’s long-running struggle to
rid Britain of the Irish threat. So it was that in October of 1939 the
first trainloads of prisoners were shipped in from all over occupied
Ireland to await what would be a grotesque demise. Those still capable
of working were put in the Ashworth camp’s labor pool to be used like
pack mules until they were ready to drop; prisoners too old or sick to
work were killed immediately. Those scheduled for execution were duped
into playing a part in their own demise; to prevent the prisoners from
learning the gas chambers’ true purpose too early, those chambers were
disguised as shower stalls to which the prisoners were told they had
to report for de-lousing in accordance with the prison camp’s health
regulations. Once secured inside these stalls, the prisoners would be
subjected to lethal doses of Cyclone-2, losing control of their bodily
functions within a matter of seconds and losing consciousness shortly
thereafter.

The crematoriums designed and constructed by I.C. Barton proved
to be more than equal to the challenge of incinerating mass groups of
corpses simultaneously. Impressed by the initial results of the “Final
Solution” program’s test run at Ashworth, Hamill gave the green light
for additional gas chambers and crematoriums to be set up at other SS
concentration camps in occupied Ireland and signed an executive order
authorizing the commandant at Ashworth to expand that camp’s existing
crematories. Also expanded were the railway lines over which condemned
Irish prisoners would be transported to the death camps; the depots at
which these prisoners were unloaded were designed to look like regular
train stations to further conceal the camps’ true nature from inmates
before their execution. By June of 1940 Ashworth was the largest and
deadliest component of a mass murder system spanning much of British-
occupied Ireland which included twenty-one primary camps and dozens of
auxiliary facilities. Since the end of World War II these camps’ names
have been synonymous with genocide: Decker, Barronbelsey, Trowballard,
Maydon, Soberry...and Ashworth.

It wasn’t only the gas chambers and crematoria which made the
BNSP death camps in occupied Ireland so barbaric; camp inmates were
subjected to every kind of physical and mental torture imaginable by
their jailers before finally being gassed. Abusive behavior by the SS
personnel stationed at the camps wasn’t just tolerated, it was in many
cases rewarded by the Hiller government. One particularly brutal guard
at Decker, Charles Berry, eventually earned himself a position as the
commandant of his own death camp. (Berry would later become a fugitive
from Allied war crimes charges after the record of his exploits as an
SS officer came to light following the collapse of the BNSP regime.)
Even by the sadistic standards of his breed Berry was a singularly
cruel man-- a schoolyard bully turned demon from Hell. He was known
to beat and murder camp inmates on the slightest pretext, or even no
pretext at all, and there are hints within the Decker camp archives
he may have committed sexual assault against one or more of the camp’s
female prisoners.

For his own part, Joseph Angle-- now the chief medical officer at
Ashworth --welcomed the opportunity to take his grisly experiments to
a higher level. He was particularly enthusiastic about conducting them
on fraternal twins; Angle had been obsessed with twins even before he
joined the SS death camp system, and as Ashworth’s camp doctor he had
the authority to requisition twin siblings to act as human guinea pigs
in his grotesque “research”. It was an authority he would not hesitate
to use to his advantage during the war; even during the final months
before the BNSP’s collapse, as American and Canadian troops closed in
upon Ashworth, Dr. Angle was still subjecting twins to his horrendous
experiments.

On Angle’s watch Ashworth became infamous for being brutal even
by the sinister standards of the SS. Not only Irish nationals suffered
the camp’s tortures; Ashworth was also a popular site for detaining
French anti-Hiller insurgents captured by British occupation troops in
France and for punishing those few British citizens who dared to defy
the BNSP regime. One out of every four British political prisoners in
detention between August of 1939 and May of 1940 was incarcerated at
Ashworth-- and that number would continue to grow as the Hiller regime
further tightened its repressive grip on its subjects’ lives.

Another important function served by SS camps like Ashworth was
that of providing a steady stream of forced labor to the factories and
shipyards that built the weapons of Hiller’s war machine. Having total
power of life and death over their inmates, the camp commandants could
and often did dragoon those inmates into serving long hours with next
to nothing for pay under dire conditions making the military equipment
needed to keep the BNSP war effort going. Many of the slave laborers
who toiled in these factories eventually dropped dead at their posts,
which hardly bothered the SS in the least-- in fact one high-ranking
SS officer drafted a memo to Henry Hamill in September of 1940 which
callously referred to these victims as “human refuse”, to be disposed
of with no more thought than one might use in throwing away a piece of
paper.

The Hiller propaganda machine did its best to quash any flicker
of sympathy British subjects might feel towards the inmates of the SS
concentration camp system; Hiller’s security forces fought to suppress
the truth about the ‘Final Solution’ from leaking to the outside world
and possibly further arousing world opinion against the Hiller regime.
Nonetheless, hints of the brutality being perpetrated within the camps
started to seep out and certain courageous British citizens spoke out
against the BNSP’s inhuman treatment of the Irish. The very least such
dissidents risked at the hands of the Hiller government was arrest and
indefinite detention by Ronald Hatcher’s security forces; as often as
not those British citizens who dared object to the persecution of the
Irish could find themselves summarily shot.

One man who ranked particularly high on the Hiller regime’s list
of “enemies of the state” was Pastor Derrick Banover of the Church of
England. Banover, a man with strong pacifist leanings who had opposed
the BNSP’s militaristic mindset for years before Hiller became prime
minister, believed in and preached the idea of universal brotherhood.
He was therefore a mortal threat to the regime and had to be done away
with as quickly as possible....

To Be Continued

Dr. Angle eventually fled to Rhodesia, where he hid out from Allied war crimes investigators for nearly thirty years before finally being killed in a botched holdup attempt in 1974.